Tiny soaps

I guess it was those bars of soap that first alerted me.

I buy packages of bath soap, maybe ten bars to a package.  I won't tell you the brand, except that it's a four-letter word beginning with "D," and that I'm glad I use it and wish everybody did. 

A couple of years ago, I noted that the bars had begun presenting a more esthetic, scupted appearance.  But then I also noticed that the sculpting was actually a concave excavation.  The soap company had shaped the bars so that there was less soap in each bar, although the overall dimensions, as seen in the outer wrappings, appeared no different from before.

How odd, I thought, that a soap company would save a little bit of soap on each bar, just so they could, presumably, not raise the price.  Of course, most people don't use a bar of soap down to the last cubic centimeter -- they toss it and open a new bar.  So the company not only saves costs on each bar, but induces buyers to throw out a greater proportion of the soap they purchase than they would otherwise.

A bit cheezy, but I shrugged it aside and bought more soap.

Then came the toilet paper issue.  This month, I've noticed that toilet paper now comes in smaller rolls.  Not smaller in size per square, thank God, but smaller in diameter per roll.  Again, another apparent attempt to hold down the price of product per unit by decreasing the amount of product per unit.

Where will it all end?  Salespersons with straight faces selling face cloths to us as "bath towels"?  Cologne and shaving lotion in perfume bottles?  Children's paper scissors advertised as home barbering scissors?  A pint of beer with only 14 ounces? (Oops, they do that already.)

Toothpaste comes in varying sized tubes, so it's difficult to know whether they have been reducing those sizes.  So far as I've noticed -- not that I'm all that observant when it comes to tubes of tooth paste -- they haven't.  But, as tooth paste manufacturers cast envious eyes on recent doings in the soap and toilet paper market, surely the temptation will exist?

You know those little "travel size" tubes that meet TSA airline regulations for carry-on bags?  Will those eventually be described as "jumbo size"?  Sort of like olives, where "large" means small, and "jumbo" means medium?  Or, inversely to women's clothing sizes, where a size 12 steadily grows larger to meet ever larger women.  (As Wikipedia warns, in giving dimensions of women's sizes:  "These charts are significantly smaller than many current US clothing companies.")  But dress sizes face different consumer hopes and fears -- an American woman's  hope is to buy less goods per dress unit, not more. 

In general, the trend, even as we grow larger and larger in body size, is to provide less and less per unit for products to wash, dry, and otherwise pamper those plump bodies.  Like many others, I suppose I'll gradually just stop my comparison shopping, my studying the "price per ounce" information provided by the supermarkets.  I'll just throw stuff on the counter, swipe my Visa card, and close my eyes when my purchases are totaled.

It's better that way.  When you know you're playing a game that's fixed, you ultimately lose interest in the details of how your loss has been accomplished.